Tag Archives: spillover

Over the past year I have helped Dr. Scott McArt from Cornell University to get preliminary data and write an NIH grant to investigate the spread of parasites in wild bees. It has now been confirmed that the 5 year, $2 million grant has been awarded!

The grant also includes Professor Steve Ellner and Professor Chris Myers (both at Cornell), Professor Lynn Adler at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Dr Rebecca Irwin at North Carolina State University; and Dr Quinn McFrederick University of California, Riverside.

Over the course of the grant, we will look to model the transmission of parasites by developing a technique that looks at broad traits shared among species. Such techniques are a growing trend among community ecologists but have never been used with pollinators and plants. This method will simplify how data are processed; traditional taxonomic approaches consider the relative importance of each individual bee and flower within an ecosystem to tease out patterns of interactions and transmission.

The results will help inform land managers, farmers, landscapers and others which wildflower traits promote bee health and which may spread disease.

I have recently completed a review of research looking at disease in wild bees that are near managed honey bees and managed bumblebees.

In this work, I list the problems managed bees cause with specific examples from America, Asia and Europe and based on the evidence, suggest what practices could reduce the harm managed bees do to wild bees. We recommend first that the safety of bee transport be improved by employing rigorous disease screening of bees and creating unified international regulations to prevent the movement of diseased bees. Second, we advise that the mixing of managed bumblebees with wild bees should be prevented by using nets over glasshouses containing managed bumblebees. Finally, we recommend an increased conservation effort to limit the effects of managed bee use in areas suffering wild bee declines.

In this review I also give an overview of the history of the commercialisation of bumblebees – a relatively new industry.

PhD: I’ve embarked on a 3.5 year research PhD investigating pathogen spillover from commercial bumblebees colonies to native bees. Based at the University of Leeds with Dr William Hughes, the work will be done in partnership with the bumblebee conservation trust.